> React was a blessing for the few creating apps that needed more than jquery, and that AngularJS 1 couldn't handle for perfs reason.

performance was the least attractive reason for adopting React. React introduced composition as the default way of thinking about UIs to the web. You created components and used them to build more complex components. Data was immutable and flowed in one direction (parent component -> child component).

Comparing the above to ng with its dependency injection, MVC style approach to UIs, that used HTML based annotations and tags to sprinkle in functionality (`ng-if` baby) -- it was a much more simple way to build web applications.

React's style of building UIs has largely won. Vue, etc. all follow this component with composition view of the world.

> React sucked for years, with a terrible doc, a crippling webpack experience and breaking compact all the time.

Webpack has nothing to do with React. React has always had good documentation. The reason the documentation was good in the beginning was because the API surface area was tiny compared to Backbone, Ember, ng, etc..

I'm not going to go point by point here. You sound like you have a very superficial understanding of the space.

I'm going to hard pass on clicking a marketing link to your blog.

XML was genuinely better than fix-width data formats (COBOL) or character-separated fields (CSV, HL7) for most APIs. Hierarchical deeply nested trees of data were the future. Everyone uses JSON or a more industrial format like protobuf/avro/BSON to represent such data now, but it wasn't necessarily wrong to point at XML and say it was an improvement.

> React sucked for years, with a terrible doc, a crippling webpack experience and breaking compact all the time.

Webpack wasn't how it started, remember gulp?

Also don't forget the switch from class components to functions, then inventing "hook" functions to reintroduce functionality that already existed in the class components.

For the past few years I've been on a team that handles a legacy system from long before React existed (internal) that just renders HTML directly, a client website that uses Backbone, and a newer client website that uses modern React. The old internal one that doesn't use any frontend frameworks has been by far the nicest to work with, and Backbone the worst.

I think that's some missing context as well - React+Redux was much better than what came immediately before it, for complex web apps. But when you're not building something like that, yeah, both are worse. It just doesn't seem like the Backbone era encouraged people to use it for everything, unlike React.

> React was a blessing for the few creating apps that needed more than jquery, and that AngularJS 1 couldn't handle for perfs reason.

React solved a very specific issue that was a pain in Angular, which is making it easy to write small, self-contained components and attach them to a mostly static site. That people decided to use it to make entire SPAs further illustrates how much easier they found it than other solutions.

I can't think of a case where JQuery code is ever simpler than React code, even for small things. If you need to worry about the order of rendered items or moving them into different categories on a page based on input, it's much simpler in React.